Songfacts®:

• Like Bobbie Gentry's "Ode To Billie Joe," this tragic song from Dolly Parton tells the story of a young person who commits suicide by jumping off a bridge. Although Parton's tune was released on her 1968 album, Just Because I'm A Woman, it was written years earlier when she was in high school, predating Gentry's 1967 hit.
• Parton puts herself in the shoes of an abandoned pregnant girl who stands at the edge of a bridge, where she and her unborn baby's father shared happier times. Only now, she's alone and desperate, preparing to jump. "She is thinking, 'There's no way out of this, so I'm just going to take that plunge and go.' A lot of people go through that. I've had suicides in my own family. It's a horrible thing to have to deal with," she explained in her 2020 book, Songteller.
  
  "As a songwriter, I love to write those mournful things and put myself in those situations. It comes from those early days with all of the old songs I grew up with. I loved feeling all the sorrow in a song. In my early days, I just wrote about everything. I just wanted to write great stories, or write about situations that I could imagine myself in."
• Parton had her own struggle with suicidal thoughts in the early '80s after surgery for endometriosis left her unable to bear children and she embarked on a regrettable emotional affair. "It was a really bad time," she told Closer of her two-year depression. But the experienced forced her to re-examine her life. "Sometimes God just has to smack you down. He was almost saying, 'Sit your pretty little ass down because we have to deal with some stuff!'"
• Just Because I'm A Woman is known for its title track, a bold take on the double standard women face over their sexual experience compared to men. Her second solo album (and first with RCA), it peaked at #22 on the Country Albums chart.